a book blog, and then some

All posts tagged: Writing

Years. Actual years of editing. So many drafts I’ve forgotten to celebrate when I finish one. But this week something special happened. This week I finished draft eight of The Young Volcanoes of Tenemere. And I’m not going to do what I usually do, that is, take a couple days off then get cracking with the next draft. This time, I’m going to take the time to be proud of myself, because it draft eight has turned out to be quite a special one. Of my eight drafts, three have been major. What do I mean by major? I mean I’ve basically re-written the entire thing. If I opened up my first draft, the one I started in November 2014 after two years of part-time planning, I don’t know if I would recognise it. I’ve put a lot of work into this novel, only the first in a whole series I am still building. But as slow, and painful, and hard and sometimes full-on depressing as it has been, it’s also been pretty damn great. …

If you want to be taken seriously as an author, you have to invest in a decent website. This is what I told myself as I clicked ‘purchase’ on a £70 yearly subscription to upgrade my hosting. Yeah, £70 ain’t a bad price, but as someone who has yet to earn a penny from her writing, it’s a statement. A commitment. It’s £70. I neglected my blog for about a year. It just wasn’t pleasing me. I was no longer satisfied with just a blog. I wanted a website. I wanted it to look swish and aesthetically fabulous; a site I could be proud of, the face of my ‘business’. I tried multiple times to make the best of the free WordPress themes; I cannot tell you how many hours I spent wrestling with its appearance. Nothing was good enough. Nothing made me happy. Still, I didn’t upgrade. A custom domain name and access to themes beyond my wildest dreams, all available for me to code devoutly and make entirely my own. All within my …